life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

The weather is insane; it was snowing all weekend.

Thanks to the sainted Patrick, I have a three-day weekend. Apparently they were celebrating it on Sandy Row as well; if we could get on board the holiday, perhaps we could move on next to Irish, and then we could get rid of the whole embarrassing Ulster-Scots thing.

The new LJ layout Vertigo has been released in beta; if you like Dystopia you might want to give it a try. I can in when Dystopia was the default, so it's sort of nostalgically familiar to me.

BT have put up the monthly charge for surftime by £2. Apparently it's due to a decline in demand because of increasing broadband use.

WELL WE TRIED TO GET BROADBAND. We're about three miles from the exchange in Smalltown as the crow flies, but BT in their wisdom connect us via Townland, halfway to Largetown eight miles away. Unsurprisingly this meandering line cannot support DSL. They phoned up my dad and sold him broadband over the phone, even checking the postcode. Then they had to have about three visits from the engineer before they would accept that the fault is in their line.

So basically, we're paying more money for a poorer service that we don't even want.

I was flicking through Michael Moore's Stupid White Men today. He takes a chapter off from Bush and Co to discuss global problem children...sure enough, the craziest corner of north Europe's in there.

His contribution to the solution of all Northern Ireland's problems? Convert the Protestants to Catholicism by force.

You know, he should have pitched that to the writers of Give My Head Peace instead.

First, Protestant does not equal Loyalist or even Unionist. Ditto Catholic and Republican/Nationalist. There's a very strong correlation, but it's not 100%.

Secondly, I know it's a joke. Lighten up, and all that. But you can only laugh about it if you've lived in the mess. How come the Palestinians got passive resistance, which might have a minuscule chance of making things better, and Northern Ireland got a sneer?

Than man spent pages and pages complaining that Bush is presiedent even though he had a minority of the votes. This seemed to get him very angry. So why is he even mentioning the equivalent of waving a sparkly wand at Democrats and crying 'You're a Republican'? So what does he mean, Britain has no right to Northern Ireland? Majorities win, NI has a Unionist majority, that's why it's part of the UK.

The problem with Northern Ireland isn't the Protestants; it's the inability of people to stop hating The Other Lot, the horrendously disadvantaged areas, the bastard gun-runners who are in the drugs these days, the economy that took off (goodness knows how when 65% of all jobs are in the public sector) and left the bottom section of the population behind, the paramilitary control of communities.

You know, I'd really like to see Mr Moore, a priest and a bucket of holy water in tow, set off up the Shankill to pacify Northern Ireland. On foot, if you please. I hope he isn't overly fond of his teeth. Or his kneecaps.

There is a total lunar eclipse tonight and, happily, the sky is clear. No sign of a shadow yet, it's meant to reach totality at 2045. Apparently it won't be a dark red because there haven't been any volcanic eruptions recently, so not much dust in the upper atmosphere.

We finally got a mass privacy editing tool!

Plus a lot of other stuff, including ads on site pages to logged-out users, sigh.

Dalek plushies!

We wants it, my precious!

The Torchwood finale:

( Do I need to cut for spoilers? )

This week I remembered that I've never put my entry for the Vorkosigan ficathon up on ff.net. (Especially disgraceful seeing as it's been translated into Russian—the first fic I ever wrote that's been translated. It's extremely humorous to run it back through Babelfish.)
I'm still not quite satisfied with it, though. It's hard to let go of something, to say, 'ok, finished', especially when the source material is of such high quality.

Aiee! Why must LJ insist on turning itself nasty colours for special occasions?? Also, it is somewhat broken. Is this because of the recent code push, or did ohnotheydidnt break it again?

We met a suicidal pheasant in the road yesterday. Fortunately there was nothing coming the other way, so my dad swerved and missed it, but I couldn't help thinking of Lawrie Marlow.

This evening my mam looked through the kitchen door into the darkened utility room, and said, 'Aw, what are you doing out there my yourself, wee pet?' to Smudge, the black and white cat. Closer inspection revealed that she was speaking to my brother's school uniform trousers which were waiting to be put into the washing machine; black with a white strip at the inside of the waist, and what she thought was Smudge's eye was in fact the metal catch of the flies.